Читать книгу Princess From the Past - Caitlin Crews - Страница 7

BETHANY Vassal did not have to turn around. She knew exactly who had just entered the exclusive art-gallery in Toronto’s glamorous Yorkville neighborhood. Even if she had not heard the increased buzz from the well-clad, cocktail-sipping crowd, or felt the sudden spike in energy roll through the long, bright space like an earthquake, she would have known. Her body knew and reacted immediately. The back of her neck prickled in warning. Her stomach tensed. Her muscles clenched tight in automatic response. She stopped pretending to gaze at the bold colors and twisted shapes of the painting before her and let her eyes drift closed to ward off the memories. And the pain—so much pain.

He was here. After all this time, after all her agonizing, planning and years of isolation, he was in the same room. She told herself she was ready.

She had to be.

Bethany turned slowly. She had deliberately situated herself in the furthest corner of the upscale gallery so she could see down the gleaming wood and white corridor to the door, so she could prepare herself when he arrived. But the truth, she was forced to admit to herself as she finally twisted all the way around to face the inevitable commotion near the great glass doors, was that there was really no way to prepare. Not for Prince Leopoldo Di Marco.

Her husband.

Soon to be ex-husband, she told herself fiercely. If she told herself the same thing long enough, it had to become true, didn’t it? It had nearly killed her to leave him three years ago, but this was different. She was different.

She had been so broken when she’d met him—still reeling from the death of the bed-ridden father she’d cared for through his last years; still spinning wildly in the knowledge that suddenly, at twenty-three, she could have any life she wanted instead of being a sick man’s care-giver. Except she hadn’t known what to want. The only world she’d ever known had been so small. She had been grieving—and then there had been Leo, like a sudden bright sunrise after years of rain.

She’d believed he was perfect, the perfect prince out of a story book. And she’d believed that with him she was some kind of fairy-tale princess who could escape into the perfect dream come true. Bethany’s mouth twisted. She’d certainly learned better, hadn’t she? He’d smashed that belief into pieces by abandoning her in every way that mattered once they’d reached his home in Italy. By shutting her out, leaving her more alone than she had ever been before, overwhelmed and lonely half a world away from all she’d ever known.

And then he’d decided he wanted to bring a child into all of that despair. It had been impossible, the final straw. Bethany’s hands clenched at her sides as if she could strike out at her memories. She forced herself to take a deep breath. Anger would not help her now—only focus. She had very specific goals tonight. She wanted her freedom, and she could not allow herself to get sidetracked by the past.

Then she looked up and saw him. The world seemed to contract and then expand around her. Time seemed to stop—or perhaps that was simply her ability to draw breath.

He strode through the gallery, flanked by two stone-faced members of his security detail. He was, as he had always been, a heartbreaking study of dark-haired, gleaming-eyed Italian male beauty. He wore, with nonchalant ease, an elegantly tailored dark suit that somehow made him seem even more ruggedly handsome than he naturally was. It clung to his broad shoulders and showcased his mouth-watering physique.

But Bethany could not allow herself to focus on his physicality; it was too dangerous. She had forgotten, somehow, that he was so …vivid. Her memory had made him smaller, duller. It had muted the sheer force of him, making her forget how commanding he was, how his uncompromising masculinity and irrefutable power seemed to radiate from him, making everyone in his vicinity both step back and stare.

It also made her profoundly sad. She swallowed and tried to shake the melancholy away. It could not possibly help her here.

His long, tall, exquisitely hewn body, was all rangy muscle and sensual male grace, moving through the crowd with a kind of liquid ease. His cheekbones were high and pronounced—noticeable from across a large room. He carried himself as if he were a king or a god. His mouth, even in its current flat, disapproving line, hinted at the shattering sensuality she knew far too well he could and would use as his most devastating weapon against her. His rich, thick, dark-brown hair was cut to suit perfectly the ruthless, focused magnate she knew him to be—whatever else he might be.

Everything he wore, even the way he held himself, broadcasted his wealth, his power, and that dark, sexual magnetism that was uniquely his. It was as much a part of him as his olive skin, his corded muscles and his earthy, woodsy scent—which she must be remembering, she told herself, frowning, for she was certainly not close enough to him to smell his skin. Nor would she be ever again, she vowed.

For he was no fairy tale prince, as she had once so innocently imagined. Bethany had to bite back a hollow laugh. There were no swelling, happy songs, no happily-ever-afters—not with Leo Di Marco, Principe di Felici. Bethany had learned that the hardest, most painful way possible. His was an ancient and revered title, with ancient responsibilities and immutable duties, and Leo was its steward. First, foremost, always, he was the title.

She watched his dark eyes flick through the crowd with ruthless impatience. He looked annoyed. Already. She sucked in a shaky breath. Then, inevitably, he found her. She felt the kick of his gaze like a punch to her gut and had to breathe through the sudden light-headedness. She had wanted this, she reminded herself. She had to see this through now, finally, or she did not know what might become of her.

Bethany had to force herself to stand up straight, to simply wait there as he bore down on her. She crossed her arms, held on tight to her elbows and tried to look unmoved by his approach even as she quaked with that inevitable, unfair reaction to his presence that had always ruined her attempts to stand up to him before. Meanwhile memories she refused to delve into haunted her still, flickering across her mind too quickly, leaving the same old scars behind.

Leo dismissed his bodyguards with the barest flick of a finger, his dark gaze fused to hers, his long legs eating up the distance between them. He looked overpowering and overwhelming, as he always had, as he always would—as if he alone could block out the rest of the world. Worst of all, she knew he could. And would. And did.

Bethany’s throat was too dry. She had the overwhelming urge to turn away, to run, but she knew he would only follow. More than that, it would defeat her purpose. She had chosen this particular meeting-place deliberately: a bright and crowded art-opening filled with the sort of people who would recognize a man of Leo’s stature at a glance. Protection, she had thought, as much from Leo’s inevitable fury as from her own ungovernable response to this man.

This would not be like the last time. He had been so angry and she had foolishly thought that maybe they might work something out—if he’d actually spoken to her for once, instead of putting her off. Three years had passed since that night, and still, thinking of the things he had said and the way it had all exploded into that devastating, unwanted and uncontainable passion, that still shamed her to remember—

She shoved the memories aside and squared her shoulders.

Then he was right there in front of her, his gaze taut on hers. She could not breathe.

Leo.

Already, after mere seconds, that heady, potent masculinity that was his and his alone pulled her in, tugging at parts of her she’d thought long dead. Already she felt that terrible, familiar yearning swell within her, urging her to move closer, to bury herself in the heat of him, to lose herself in him as she nearly had before.

But she was different now. She’d had to be to survive him. She was no longer the naïve, weak little girl he had handled so carelessly throughout the eighteen harrowing months of their marriage. The girl with no boundaries and no ability to stand up for herself.

She would never be that girl again. She had worked too hard three years ago to leave her behind. To grow into the woman she should have been all along.

Leo merely stared at her, his dark, coffee-colored eyes narrowing slightly, as bitter and black as she remembered. He would have looked indolent, almost bored, were it not for the faintest hint of grim tension in his lean jaw and the sense of carefully leashed power that hummed just beneath his skin.

“Hello, Bethany,” he said, his sardonic voice richer, deeper than she’d remembered.

Her name in his cruel mouth felt …intimate. It mocked her with the memories she refused to acknowledge, yet still seemed to affect her breathing, her skin, her heartbeat.

“What game are you playing tonight?” he asked softly, his eyes dark and unreadable, his voice controlled. “I am touched that you thought to include me after all this time.”

She could not let him cow her; she could not let him shake her. Bethany knew it was now or never. She clenched her hands tighter around her elbows, digging her fingers deep into her own flesh.

“I want a divorce,” she said, tilting back her head to look at him directly.

She had planned and practiced those words for so long in her mirror, in her head, in every spare moment, that she knew she sounded just as she wished to sound: calm, cool, resolute. There was no hint at all of the turmoil that rolled inside of her.

The words seemed to hang there in the space between their bodies. Bethany kept her gaze trained on Leo’s, ignoring the hectic color she could feel scratching at her neck and pretending she was not at all affected by the way he seemed to go very still as he looked at her with narrowed eyes. As if he was gathering himself to pounce. Bethany’s heart pounded as if she’d screamed that single sentence loud enough to shatter glass, shred clothing and perhaps even rebound off the top of the iconic CN Tower to deafen the entire city.

It was the man standing much too close to her. Leo was next to her, so close she could nearly feel the waves of heat and arrogance emanate from him. Leo, watching her with those intense, unreadable eyes. It made something deep inside of her flex and coil. Leo was the husband she had once loved so destructively, so desperately, when she did not know enough to love herself. It made her want to weep as that same old sadness washed through her, reminding her of all the ways they had failed each other. But no more. No more.

Her stomach was a tense, clenched ball. Her palms were damp. She had to fight to keep her vision clear, her eyes bland. She had to order herself repeatedly not to heed her body’s urgent demand that she wrench her gaze away and flee.

Indifference, she reminded herself. She must show him nothing but indifference, however feigned it might be. Anything but that, and all would be lost. She would be lost.

“It is a great pleasure to see you too,” Leo said finally with an unmistakable edge in his voice. His English had a distinctly British intonation that spoke of his years of education, with the sensual caress of his native Italian beneath. His dark eyes gleamed with cold censure as they flicked over her, taking in the careful chignon that tamed her dark-brown curls, her minimal cosmetics, the severe black suit. She had worn it to convince them both that this was nothing more than a bit of unpleasant business—and because it helped conceal her figure from his appraisal. She was a far cry from the girl he had once memorably brought to climax with no more than his hot, demanding gaze, and still he made her want to squirm. Still, she felt brushfires blaze to life in every place his dark gaze touched her.

She hated what he could do to her even now, after everything. As if three years later her body still had not received the message that they were finished.

Leo continued, his voice dangerously even, his gaze like steel. “I do not know why it should surprise me in the least that a woman who would behave as you have done should greet your husband in such a fashion.”

She could not let him see that he rattled her still, when she had thought—prayed—that she’d put all that behind her. But she told herself she could worry about what that might mean later, at her leisure, when she had the years ahead of her to process all the things she felt about this man. When she was free of him.

And she had to be free of him. It was finally time to live her own life on her own terms. It was time to give up that doomed, pathetic hope she was embarrassed to admit she harbored that he would keep his angry promise to come after her and drag her back home if she dared leave him. He had come that one terrible night and then left again, telling her in no uncertain terms of her importance to him. It was three years past time to accord him the same courtesy.

“You will forgive me if I did not think the social niceties had any place here,” she said instead as calmly as she could, as if she could not feel that sharp gaze of his leaving marks on her skin. “Given our circumstances.”

Bethany had to move then, or explode. She walked toward the next bright, jumbled canvas on the stark-white wall and sensed instead of saw Leo keep pace with her. When she stopped moving, he was beside her once again, close enough that she could almost feel his heat, the corded strength in his arm. Close enough that she was tempted to lean into him.

At least now she could control her destructive impulses, she thought bitterly, even if she could not quite rid herself of those urges as she’d like.

“Our ‘circumstances,’” he echoed after a tense, simmering moment, his voice dark and sinful, at odds with the razor’s edge beneath. “Is that what you call it? Is that how you rationalize your actions?” A quick sideways glance confirmed that one dark brow was raised, mocking and cruel, matching his tone perfectly. Bethany knew that expression all too well. A chill moved through her.

She was aware of her own pulse drumming wildly in her veins and had to stop herself from fidgeting with the force of will that, three years ago, she had not known she possessed. But it had been forged day by day in the bright fire of his cold indifference. At least she knew it existed now, and that she could use it.

“It does not matter what you wish to call it,” she said, fighting to remain cool. She turned toward him and wished at once that she had not. He was too big, too male, too much. “It is obviously time that both of us moved on.”

She did not care for the way that Leo watched her then, his eyes hooded, predatory. They reminded her exactly how dangerous this man was and exactly why she had left him in the first place.

“This is why you deigned to contact me tonight?” he asked in a deceptively soft voice that sent a chill spiraling down her spine. “To discuss a divorce?”

“Why else would I contact you?” she asked, wanting her voice to sound careless, light, but hearing all too well that it was tight with anxiety.

“I can think of no other reason, of course,” he said, his eyes fixed on her in a way that made her deeply uncomfortable down into her very bones. She set her jaw and refused to look away. “Certainly I knew better than to imagine that you might finally be ready to resume your duties or keep your promises. And yet here I am.”

She did not know how long she could keep this up. He was too overwhelming, too impossible. She had been unable to handle him when he had been as lost in the volcanic passion between them as she was. But his anger, his lacerating coldness, was much, much worse. She was not certain she was equal to it. She was not at all sure she could pretend not to be wounded by it.

“I do not want anything from you except this divorce,” Bethany forced herself to say.

Her body was staging a civil war. One part wanted to run for the door and disappear into the chilly fall evening. What was truly distressing and shocking was that part of her did not. Part of her instead ached for his hands that she knew could wield such dark sorcery against her flesh. She did not want to think about that. To remember. Touching Leo Di Marco was like leaping head-first into the sun. She would not survive it a second time. She would feel too much, he would feel too little and she would be the one to pay the price. She knew it as well as she knew her own name.

She straightened her shoulders, and made herself look at him directly, as if she were truly brave instead of desperate. Did it really matter which? “I want to be done with this farce, Leo.”

“And to what farce, exactly, do you refer?” he asked silkily, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, his gaze fixed on her face in a way that made her want to fidget. It made her feel scorched from the inside out. “When you ran away from me, from our marriage and our home, and relocated halfway across the globe?”

“That was not a farce,” she dared to say. There was no longer anything to lose, and she could not give in to her own desolation. “It was a fact.”

“It is a disgrace,” he said, his voice deceptively quiet, though she did not mistake the cold ferocity and hard lash of it. “But why speak of such things? You prove with your every breath that you have no interest at all in the shame you bring upon my family, my name.”

“Which is why we must divorce,” Bethany said, fighting to keep the edge from her voice and failing. “Problem solved.”

“Tell me something,” he said. With a peremptory jerk of his chin, he dismissed a hovering gallery-worker bearing a tray of champagne flutes then returned his gaze to Bethany’s. “Why this particular step? And why now? It has been three years since you abandoned me.”

“Since I escaped, you mean,” she retorted without thinking, and knew as soon as the words had passed her lips that she had made a grave error.

His dark eyes flared with heat and she felt an answering fire rage through her. It was as potent as the sense of being nothing more to him than prey, but she could not allow herself to look away.

She could not allow him to railroad her into another bargain with the devil made out of desperation and, cruelest of all, that tiny flicker of hope that nothing had ever managed to stamp out—not even his disinterest. She had to be out from under his thumb.

For good.

Prince Leo Di Marco told himself he was coldly, deeply furious. But it was no more than anger, no more than righteous indignation, he assured himself; it went no deeper than that. This woman’s uncanny ability to sneak around his lifelong armor and wound him was a thing of the past. It had to be.

He had spent the whole of his day in meetings on Bay Street, Toronto’s financial center. There was not a banker or businessman there who dared challenge the ancient Di Marco name—much less the near-limitless funds that went with it. Bethany was the only woman who had ever defied him, who had ever hurt him. The only person that he could remember doing so.

Three years on and she was doing it still. He had to fight himself to maintain his controlled exterior. He could feel the anger that only she inspired in him opening up that great, black cavern within him that he had long preferred to ignore. He knew exactly why she had demanded they meet in a public place—as if he was some kind of wild animal. As if he needed to be contained. Handled. He was not certain why this insult, atop all the others, should bite at him so deeply.

It infuriated him that he was not immune to her fresh-faced beauty that had so captivated and deceived him in the first place. She was still far too much of a temptation. Her angelic blue eyes were such an intriguing contrast to her dark-brown curls, all of it tempered with the faintest spray of freckles across her pert nose. He did not allow himself to concentrate on the delicate fullness of her mouth. It did not seem to matter that he knew her appearance of wide-eyed innocence was nothing more than an act.

It never seemed to matter.

He wanted his hands on her skin, his mouth on her breast. Those tight, ripe nipples against his tongue. He told himself it was all he wanted, all he chose to allow himself to want.

“Escaped?” he queried, icily. “The last I checked, you were living quite comfortably. In a house I own.”

“Because you demanded it!” she hissed, that fascinating splash of color rising from her graceful neck toward her soft cheeks. He knew other ways to raise that color upon her delicate skin and very nearly smiled, remembering. She darted a glance around at the crowd which surrounded them, as if for strength, then faced him again. “I wanted nothing to do with that house.”

He was a man who commanded empires. He had done so since his father’s death when he was only twenty-eight, maintaining his family’s ancient wealth while expanding it into the new era. How could this one woman continue to defy him? How was it possible? What weakness in him kept him from simply crushing her beneath his foot?

But he already knew the weakness intimately. It had already ruined him. He felt it in the heaviness in his groin, the edgy need that spiraled through him and demanded he get his hands beneath the heavy black suit he knew she was wearing to hide from him. Because she could never deny what she felt when he touched her, that he knew full well. Whatever else she chose to deny, or he preferred to ignore.

“I am fascinated by your uncharacteristic acquiescence,” he said through his teeth, furious with himself and with their entire tangled history, her trail of broken promises. “I recall making any number of demands that you chose to ignore: that you remained in Italy, as tradition required. That you refrained from casting shame on my family’s name with your behavior. That you honored your vows.”

“I will not fight with you,” she told him, her blue eyes flashing and her chin rising. She made a dismissive gesture with one hand, the one that should have worn his ring yet was offensively bare. He clamped down on the surge of temper. “You can choose to revise history however you like, but I am finished arguing about it.”

“Then we are in perfect agreement,” he bit out, keeping his voice low and for her ears alone despite the fierce kick of his temper—and that hollow place beneath it that he refused to acknowledge. “I have not gained an appreciation for public scenes since we last met, Bethany. If it is your plan to embarrass me further tonight, I suggest you rethink it. I do not think this will end the way you wish it to end.”

“There is no need for a scene,” she said at once. “Public or otherwise.” She shrugged, drawing attention to her delicate neck, and reminding him of the kisses he’d once pressed there and the sweet, addictive taste of her skin. But it was as if that was from another life. “I only want to be divorced from you. Finally.”

“Because it has been such a hardship for you to stay married to me?” he asked, his voice cutting and sarcastic. “How you must struggle.”

He was not a man who believed in impassioned displays—particularly in public, where he was forever being held up against the example of his family’s long legacy—but this woman had always provoked him like no other. Tonight her eyes were too blue, her mouth set in too firm a line. It clawed at him.

“I understand how it must cut at you,” he continued coldly. “To live in such unearned luxury. To have all the benefits of my name and protection with none of the attendant responsibilities.”

“You will be pleased to learn that I no longer want them, then,” she said. She raised her brows at him in direct challenge, but he was caught by the flash of vulnerability he saw move across her face. Bethany—vulnerable? That was not a word he’d ever use to describe her. Wild. Uncontrollable. Rebellious. But never defenseless, wounded. Never.

Impatiently, Leo shoved the odd turn of thought aside. The last thing in the world he needed now was to become intrigued anew by his wife. He had yet to recover from the initial disaster that had been his first, ruinous fascination with this woman. Look where it had led them both.

“Do you not?” he asked, his voice harsh, directed as much at his errant thoughts as at her. “How can you be certain when you have treated both with such disrespect?”

“I want a divorce,” she said again with a quiet strength. “This is the end, Leo. I’m moving on with my life.”

“Are you?” he asked, his tone dangerous. She either did not hear it or did not care. “How so?”

“I am moving out of that house,” she said at once, a wild fire he could not entirely comprehend raging in her sky-blue eyes. “I hate it. I never wanted to live there in the first place.”

“You are my wife.” His voice cracked like a whip, though he knew the words had long held no meaning for her, no matter that they still moved through him like blood, like need. “Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. Just because you have turned your back on the vows you made, does not mean that I have. I told you I would protect you and I meant it, even if it is from your own folly and stubborn recklessness.”

“I’m sure you think that makes you some kind of hero,” she threw at him in a falsely polite tone that he knew was for the benefit of the crowd around them. Yet he could see the real Bethany burn bright in her eyes and the flush on her neck. “But I never thought anyone was likely to kidnap me in the first place.” She let out a short, hollow laugh. “Believe me, I do not advertise our connection.”

“And yet it exists.” His voice brooked no argument; it could have melted steel. “And because of it, you are a target.”

“I won’t be for much longer,” she said, her foolhardy determination showing in that stubborn set to her jaw and the fire in her eyes. He almost admired it. Almost. “And you’ll find that I’ve never touched any of the money in that account of yours, either. I’m going to walk out of this marriage exactly as I walked into it.”

“And where do you intend to go?” he asked quietly, softly, not daring himself to move closer. He knew, somehow, that putting his hands on her would ruin them both and expose too much.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” she said, her gaze direct and challenging, searing into him. “But I’ve met someone else.”